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I said: The key to the success of markets is the conscious involvement of people who have an incentive find out information and act on it.
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CB: At the point that they find out the information and before they act, they are planning.
Right--that kind of planning is OK. Hayek calls it entrepreneurship.
I said: The problem with planning is that it attempts to aggregate all that informatuion in one place in a group of people who have np special incentive to get it right or to do anything in particular with it.
CB: The notion that at some level the whole need not be planned, loses the rational kernel of holism in Hegelianism.
What's rational about that?
> However, not all or every last detail of planning need (or should) be done "in one place in one group of people." The plan of the whole can and must be based on and integration of planning of the parts.
What makes it planning, then--why is it an imprivement over markets if individual production units make their own decisions independently of each other, just like in a market economy?
> The fact that the Soviet efforts became over centralized, does not mean that we cannot learn from the trials and errors of that concrete experience , and make appropriate adjustments in the relationship of the whole and the parts of the (now) worldwide economic system.
Right, and the lesson that the Soviets learned was that they needed markets. Unfortunately Gorby was under the false impression that they would just grow naturally, so he took apart the central planning system without anything to put in its place.
> Communism is to be a world, species wide, system.
So, we could not plan a smaller unit, so we will try to plan a larger one?
--jks
CB
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